Minerva Adler: daughter of Holmes
by finmagik
Summary: Born from an affair between Irene Norton neé Adler and Sherlock Holmes in 1893. Minevera Adler tells about her long life from the age of 96 in 1989. How being like Holmes when a girl is not so great.


I came into the world kicking and screaming in a hospital, in Paris France. My mother's second child. The first my half-brother Simon was under the care of his Paternal grandparents the Nortons. Who instilled with nothing but hatred for his mother who stole their only son way lured into this marriage and then killed him. Not true my Mother's late husband who she loved died of a burst appendix so quickly and horribly. That all she could do was hold him and weep. And she'd had to thrust off her widow's weeds in a shorter amount of time then was proper and go back to her old career, the stage. Her old name Irene Adler: The new jersey belle. Funny how when she was nine she had been singing for just family and some family friends at Christmas. And one of those a man who trained opera singer's in Boston thought her voice was so beautiful, A new Jersey farm girl. He'd persuaded her parents to give her to him. I don't know if that was a blessing or a curse. My birth certificate is in French. It reveals my Mother's name, and that I am a girl, illegitimate. Not my father's name, of course not. He was supposed to be dead a the time. And my name Minerva. I'm pretty sure name which has been like an albatross around my thin neck was all his idea. That any child of his would be brilliant and needed a name that would show how different and wonderful it was. In a world of Bettys and Pearls I was Minerva. Always Minerva or Nervy, or Horseface, or brainbox , or 'stop being so smart nobody will marry you' or 'an ugly girl should learn to watch her mouth.'

The cruelest thing my parents ever did was send me to America to avoid scandal. I don't know exactly but in my mind I imagine my Grandparents meeting the French nurse who carried over the Atlantic on the New York docks with my infant self cradled in her arms, maybe there is a piece of paper with my name scrawled on it pinned to my clothes and I'm bundled up with a bonnet and curls. I'm to young yet to take on the vulture and scarecrow visage I do when I grow older. I wished I had been raised by my Grandmother and Grandfather Bridget and Abraham. They were they'd raised ten children seen a war, all with intelligence and compassion. My Grandfather fought for the union army. But they have such big hearts they see a baby, even one coming in such a... scandalous way as a good thing. Their youngest Herbert and his wife Lydia can't have children. So they give me to them. Herbert is clever but that was spoiled a long time ago because he had little ambition and was lazy. He wanted to be the Doctor of our little town, but he flunked out of medical school, ended up becoming the undertaker instead that and running his own farm. And as for Lydia she was dumb and she tried to be kind but she had an idea of what a girl child should be: pretty, kind, feminine, silly, domestic and a bit dim. I was none of those things, I never would be and fought so hard when she tried to mold me into her ideal daughter. Lydia's great sadness was she was barren and all she wanted was huge litter of children. If she had been able to have children, adopt or even teach she would have been more happy. But instead she had a disgruntled husband and this creature she'd been told to raise who was as alien to her as a infant from Asia. I never have suffered fools even slight fools and as I grew I saw that in my town and in the under the very roof I lived in there were to many to count.

One thing that began to puzzle me around five was my odd appearance. At five years of age I was already a head taller then all of my male cousins. Also there was body, I was to skinny, everyone in my family save for my grandfather was a cheerful endomorph and here I was the lone ectomorph. My face was long, their faces because of Grandmother Bridget from second generation Irish were round. And my nose was far to big, like a beak and they all had little noses the worse you could say is there noses looked a little like pugs. I pointed out all my observations to my 'Mom'.

"Go work on your sewing, you're stitches aren't fine enough Nervy," She would say not looking up from book she was reading.

They weren't. I didn't learn to sew tight, fine stitches, until I worked on corpses when helping Herbert. Later I made the same complaint to my Grandmother as she was making pies for the week, in her hot kitchen were she was also boiling berries for preserves. She furrowed her brow, bit her lip, and then smiled.

"Your our changeling Minerva," She said. "We're very blessed, just like your Aunt Irene. She's made such a name for herself. She sent us a letter."

And yes there was a letter, she sent four every five months, they also had newspaper clippings and money to help raise me. My Grandmother would sit me down and read them to me, I could read them myself, but I preferred this. I never knew she was anything OTHER then my aunt. Never guessed a beautiful, clever woman was so closely connected to something like me. She died when I was 15 collapsed in the lobby of a hotel in Oslo complaining of severe abdominal pains, was rushed to her room where despite the effort of hotel doctors she died. That was all the newspaper article said. When I was traveling in Europe in the mid 1920's I managed to get hold of my mother's autopsy results. And I hung my head as I read, as I had suspected. It was the result of secondary peritonitis, from compilations of a shoddy illegal abortion. Her latest patron, a wealthy Dutch businessman had kept her discreetly. By that time any remains of a relationship between My father and her were long gone. The only link was a correspondence that was mostly in-jokes and logic puzzles. The saddest thing according to the blunt language of the autopsy report this abortion was not the first. I know she kept these from my father, he could have helped her, I am sure him and his friend Dr. Watson knew medical men who were much more skilled in the art of removing unwanted tissue from the womb. But she never asked. From what I have deduced from her diary and other sources the romantic and sexual of aspect my parents relationship lasted until 1897. They wrote and met in person usually in London in some hotel or cheap and nasty east end rooming house about three times a year. Various things made this collapse, She went to England to visit her son, Simon and any time spent on dalliances however brief made her feel pangs of guilt. My father's work was much more important then any romantic or carnal pleasures. And the last rooming house were they conducted their last encounter had given them both an infestation of scabies neither could properly lie away. They ended it in letters, very coldly and in subtle language so anyone who did not have her hands on all those letters would have thought some business arrangement had ended. For when I came into my majority my Mother died she willed me when I came of age, half her money. All her jewelry, and in the Swiss bank account contents of a box there. That box contained her full correspondence with my father until her death in 1908. All her diaries from age 12 onwards. And a letter which was more like a novel to me explaining the sordid whole thing. There were tear stains on it. My half brother Simon Norton did not get as much and it gave him another reason to resent me.

She loved both of us. We were both the children of men who she had loved. My mother Irene Adler, had to keep herself solvent taken rich lovers through out her life. It was common, a woman who wanted to have a career on the stage attracted them. Even the divine Bernhardt was not immune. These days in the 20th century a movie star or singer can choose who ends up in her bed. But then, you had to... to be blunt be a whore. So she took lovers, they gave her fine jewelry, places to live, food, and clothes. She was lucky when Gregory Norton a barrister and the only son of a respectable family broke with his parents to marry her because he loved her as much she loved him. With my father, it was more confused and not exactly straight forward. In the accounts set down by Dr. Watson my father seems super-human and can talk about emotion and love and things as if he knows what it is, and is not interested or vexed by it. A few years back I went visit one my many, many grand nieces. She had one those new Cds from Japan. Odd, I'd seen first wax cylinders that would announce cheerfully before they played: 'Edison records!' and watched as recorded music technology marched on. I had little interest. But this shiny, shimmering disc was so odd, so weird. I asked her to play it.

"Oh aunt Nervy you wouldn't like it, It's rock music," She said.

I do prefer classical and jazz, when Elvis and his hoodlums showed up in the 1950's I gave up on popular music.

"Bah! I don't care I want to hear it." I said. "How does it work exactly?"

"I think it uses lasers to play it," She said.

"Lasers, finally we're using lasers. I told Telsa that his work wouldn't be in vain," I said. I don't know if I was right about Telsa, the odd man was scared of my friend's earrings, hard to talk to.

She gave me an odd look, none of my cousin's children ever think I'm telling the truth. But she sighed and put the Cd into a gargantuan machine and it began to play. I thought it was going to Japanese music. But no it was some American guy giving a live concert. My niece told me his name was Leonard Cohen. He couldn't exactly sing. I mention this because one song of his brings back what my Mother's account in her diary of how the affair started with my Father. 'Love is not some kind victory march it's a cold and very broken hallelujah.' On both sides. Neither wanted it or could afford it. Women in her career could be ruined if they were discovered to have common lovers. And he well never wanted to be in love with anyone. Let Dr. Watson say what he wants how My father admired my Mother and set her above all other women, that's one thing, what started in Paris 1892 was not intended. He was supposed to be dead for one thing. He was living in Paris under the name Henry Belle a British Chemist, working in the labs of a French chemical company low level and not interesting, a cover for whatever the French goverment was really paying him for. She of course had no assumed name. She was a star. I have her diary of the time they became re-aquainted so I will let my Mother tell it.

_'I was at Moulin Rouge tonight , one the most notorious dance halls in Paris with Ing Larrson a Swedish Pine Baron who finds it amusing to bring me to such places. When I ran into Mr. Holmes again. In the flickering gas light, among the chaos of the can-can girls and their dandies. It was hard to pay attention to the man sitting with an virtually untouched glass of absinthe before him. No one else had. That was what he had hoped for. No one in this setting would know who he was. He was dead, it had been in the papers. And he was in disguise, a slight one because when you considered dead the disguise does not have to be much. I knew him. It took me a moment or two then I could place the face of a man who I seen almost a decade before. I had been interested in him at time, the only man I had met who was almost as clever as I was. But I had put him out my head. However here, bored at the antics of my patron and the rest of coarse, crude, surroundings, I welcomed seeing him. I almost surprised him. I say almost because when he turned to see me take a seat beside him, there wasn't any look of surprise in those eyes. He simply seemed to catalogue me._

_"Mrs. Norton, I heard of your loss, I am sorry. I cannot talk now I am in the middle of an investagation."_

_That's what he said to me._

_"I heard you were dead," I said in a whisper._

_"I am," he said. "I'm not, who I was. I am British expatriate Henry Belle, employee of Paris Chemical."_

_"Then what are doing here, Mr. Belle?" I asked, I was almost tittering. I knew men and their lusts all to well but him at a dance hall, it didn't fit. "You don't seem the type to enjoy this type of spree."_

_"I don't," he said. "My real employer wants to know who is behind the murders of can-can girls from the Moulin Rouge and fruit selling girls."_

_I had heard about these brutal murders everyone in Paris had they had been splashed over the newspapers with grisley pictures. There had even been speculation that Jack the Ripper had resurfaced in Paris. There were a dozen victims all young women seven were can-can dancers who no one had any high opinion of, had been found in the early morning hours their throats slashed, their bodies cut from rib cage to groin, organs had been removed, then found nearby chewed on and discarded. But the other five who had this terrible fate visited on them were just working class girls, some sold fruit or flowers, one was on her way to the factory, one going to mass. And that caused the biggest outcry. People were saying the daughters of Paris were not safe from such a monster..._

To tell you things got interesting after that would be putting it mildly. She ended up helping him with the case, he only protested a little at first. Her mind was as sharp as his was. Also the fact she was good at fighting as he was although not formerly trained.

More that she had to fight off overly amorous stage door johnnies since she was twelve or so. I understood, I'd had to do the same thing so many men over the years think that if they just kiss me or do more, I'll melt for them, if my fists and feet didn't convince them, my pistol usually did. It took some convincing of the Parisian police but she disguised herself as a can-can girl, she was as heavily made up, spoke the same lower class French. She was bait. And it worked, the suspect took it. Everything Mr. Holmes and Ms. Adler had deduced was right. Unfortunately, The man behind the murders was the son and heir of a powerful Comte. He wasn't going to meet any time soon. The French government who had been employing Sherlock Holmes to investigate this, covered it up. They sent the Comte's son off to some far off colony. And yes everyone was very well paid. The kept 'Henry Belle' on retainer and in Paris. Did this begin an affair? No. In fact my Mother wrote how refreshing it was to meet a man who wasn't attracted to her, and only wanted intellectual intercourse from her. This period of platonic friendship was a month and a half long. They would challenge each other with logic puzzles, observe people in the park or streets make deductions about their lives and play board games. Yes board games, mostly checkers (although American my mother calls it draughts which in the English fashion), backgammon and chess. Neither of them had much time for friendship with anyone. She had her opera, her patrons who were jealous of common men. And he had whatever assignments the French goverment or other European powers assinged him, also the job he was actually employed in. Most people are squeamish about the bedroom activities of their parents. But I never knew my Mother and as for my Father I hardly knew him, I met him a handful or times in my life. He was so like me, but such an enigma that I can put my Mother's diary from when this started.

_I fear I ruined the only true friendship I have. I am a woman and prone to being a slave to my emotions. I let my heart and my desires get the better of me with Mr. Holmes tonight. He stalked out of my flat, and I do not think he will come back ever. The curt way he said goodnight, is proof that the forward way I acted was utterly, utterly wrong! How could I have misjudged, how could I let myself fall in love with a man who I know does not love and sneers at it. He now despises me for throwing myself at him. Earlier tonight I was telling him that one of my patrons was getting suspicious that I was having a man to my flat. I was setting up the board for another round of backgammon._

_"I don't think it's any of his business what I do," I said. "I am a widowed woman and more besides. He knows he is not my only Patron."_

_"Could you afford to lose one of them?" Mr. Holmes asked._

_"Yes," I said. "There have been so many of them. There have been so few men I've cared for, really cared for in my life. My father, My older brother Jacob, Mr. Chapman [[the man who gave her voice training]], My late Husband and..."_

_I trailed off. I was aware that we both knew what I was about to say, I lowered my eyes and looked at the backgammon pieces. I was tied in knots inside. It hung in the air I could not meet his gaze. I had been feeling things, around Mr. Holmes for a while flutterings and burnings but I had stuffed them down, they were faint. I composed myself. I spoke again. "...What I mean Mr. Holmes is I respect you, and hold you in the highest esteem."_

_"Ah," he said and nodded. He knew I was lying, damn him! "But you don't, Mrs. Norton, I have observed the way your reactions to me since the end of Moulin Rouge case. From what I've observed you have an infatuation with me. I had hoped it wouldn't effect anything, but it appears to be interfering with what was a enjoyable diversion for both of us."_

_What I said and did next I regret awfully, because I know it was just the sort of low, sordid base gesture he loathes. I wasn't thinking, there was blood rushing in my ears so strongly. I didn't want to start crying to be a weak and silly woman. I didn't want to make pleas of love. I didn't want to deny it, because he was right, as always. So I fell back on a tact I had played countless times with other men. I reached over the table and put my hand on his, he did not draw his hand away. I drew circles with my fingers on the top of his hand. "We could make this more a enjoyable diversion."_

_It was of course an outright seduction, an appeal to lust._

_My heart was thudding in my chest. I do not know what I expected. I thought for a moment I saw a look of shock, of being flustered but the mask was back before I knew it. He withdrew his hand from under mine. He got up. He got his hat and coat. Said a short and cold goodnight and left. The slam of the door still reverberates in my heart._

Now, because I'm writing this it didn't end there. The next entry is dated the next morning, there was excited inkblots on the page and the handwritting is scrawling.

_He is still here, cleaning up in the bathtub! This morning does not feel real, as the sunlight streams through window, I feel like I am on my honeymoon again a bride again. I want to laugh, I keep humming to myself. What I thought was impossible a year ago, surreal when I met him, and at my last entry hopeless. So much has changed. It was two hours after he left. I had gotten in my robe, my hair was down and I was preparing myself a nightcap of brandy. When my maid knocked on my bedroom door and told me: 'Monsieur Belle was in my sitting room.' No my maid did not know who he was. I dismissed her and I went down to see for myself. He was there, dressed as I last saw him. He was smoking his pipe and pacing the room, furiously like there was some knotty case going on. No, not a case it was something inside of him. When he saw me, he composed himself._

There was something in his eyes, so normally cold and analytical that grabbed my heart, he was looking at me not as he had before like thing no different then a man, but as a woman. For the first time. Odd, I never had considered he felt anything like this for me. Or that he would have any trouble expressing it.

"Mrs. Norton," He said.

"Call me Irene," I injected.

"Irene," He said, his tone softening slightly.

"You want us to be lovers," He said. "I've never been interested in the physical love or romantic love. It trite and boring. Most of your sex is limited by culture, role and emotion. You are not. I-"

"Yes?"

"I would be interested in," He started again, and then he looked away. He knew how I earned my crust, he had discussed sordid and disgusting details of other men's perversions when dealing with his work. But this was to much. Later I would draw out of him that he had not touched a woman since he was an under gradudate at Oxford in the 1870s. When any adolescent hormonally induced desire had gone away, he was relieved.

"My proposal?" I said.

What happened next was curious he didn't speak. I noticed that with him he had a small wooden case. He sat down and without looking at me, opened the case there was a syringe and a small vial. He rolled up his sleeve filled the syringe, looked his arm which was pock-marked with older faint marks found a vein and injected himself. I'd known other performers who were addicts, I'd had patrons that were.

He needed this to find the well of whatever vapors of lust he had stomped down inside of himself. I went closer to him. And he had changed, he smiled at me with a light in his eyes like I was some new and exciting case. Then he sprang up, faster then I would thought. He grabbed me by the shoulders and kissed me. Yes, he kissed me! It was rough and inexpert like some animal trying to bite my lips off.

I pulled away teasingly. "So is this a yes?"

_He said nothing but gave a sound of frustration, he pulled me back. He really hadn't been with anyone in a very long time. He was older then me, but it was like being with a boy, a boy who is rough, inexpert, and has read things, and seen things and done so little. He would have had me on the floor then and there. But I managed to get us to my bedroom. What happened there, I've never spared this diary any details of any of my encounters. He wanted me naked, odd I would have thought he would be more circumspect but it the grips of cocaine and lust this was the only thought. I'm afraid I will have take my robe to a tailor for repairs. And it was rough, awkward and fast. After more then 20 years of living like a monk, I was surprised it lasted as long as it did. But that was only the first time. Finally I suppose the either the drug lost it's grip or both of us were to worn out. I didn't think I would find him here this morning, I had thought my lover of the previous night would unlace my arms from around him, dress and slip away in early hours of the morning. But he was still here. I think I will now surprise him (if possible) in the bath..._

There is such giddyness for a while. And then she fall pregnant. It's happened before she knows the signs that her body has been sending out. She is good at hiding it from the public, in those days no one knew a woman was pregnant a bugling belly wasn't paraded around like a trophy. It was hard to read about how calucating my parents became about her pregnancy. They didn't try to arrange a miscarriage, or an abortion. But they had already a plan in action for shipping me back to my grandparents barely a week after my Mother had the news confirmed by her doctor. They had the hospital picked out, everything in place. It was expected I was a boy, apparently I kicked to much and hard to be a girl. The letter about the new and not legitimate grandchild was sent along a month before I was due. They'd booked the steamer and had interviewed and vetted nurses who would care for me on the journey, three months before I made my arrival. It was love and caring about me in a way. They weren't dumping me in some European orphanage. However the fact neither where going to raise me or ever planned to see me, was heartbreaking. But both had cut out whatever remains of a heart they had, my father only cared for his friend Dr. Watson. And my Mother in the end had no one, her legitimate son Simon hated her and her family didn't know her and couldn't relate to what she had become. As for me? Once I figured how I spent most of my life hoodwinked, I hated them for years, spending my life looking like this, thinking like this and being a girl to top it off and having no idea who I really was that was what really got to me.

My uncle Herbert was the town's undertaker I've said that before. It was such a small town he also got to be the morgue and coroner. As it happened the town doctor, and Herbert ended up being friends. And the doctor pulled lots of strings for him. Herbert my 'Dad' didn't want a little girl running around a morgue, but that was half of our house. He did love me, although there was current of resentment, and he patronized me. I don't know exactly how it happened but when I was around ten or eleven I ended up helping him with the cadavers. I had snuck in their before. But there I was in an apron, hair up. I was putting make up on, sucking blood out and putting embalming fluid in. I learned to cut out organs fine as a surgeon so he could weigh them. It was also because my cousin Caleb was his offical assistant. Caleb was from the next town over, two years older then me he had sandy blonde hair and dopey grin. He was a sucker for me, always had been. He was actually impressed with my intellect. So I suppose that partly how I wormed my way into the undertaking business. I wanted to have my own career in the funerally arts but that was unheard of at the time. I might as well have told my family my ambition was to be a coptic pope. I was better at it then my 'Dad'. Pretty soon when a corpse of an outsider was rolled in I could look at it and say what kind of person they were, what their station in life was and how they met their end. When I started doing this on a regular basis I was kicked out of the morgue. The local policeman said it was to spooky and everyone else thought the strange girl was showing off. I was showing off.


End file.
